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Information

An annotated collection of 5 books, papers & essays on information, spanning 1945 to 2022. Featuring works by Friedrich Hayek, Stanisław Lem, Herbert A. Simon and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

The Use of Knowledge in Society

Friedrich Hayek, 1945 · American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4

The knowledge relevant for economic decisions is dispersed across society — never concentrated in a single mind. No central planner can aggregate it well. Markets work because they are a decentralised mechanism for proce…

His Master's Voice

Stanisław Lem, 1968 · Czytelnik (trans. Michael Kandel, 1983)

If Solaris is the mirror rendered as emotion, His Master's Voice is the mirror rendered as epistemology. A vast, brilliant, well-funded team sets out to decode a signal from space, and never manages to confirm they have…

Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

Herbert A. Simon, 1971 · In M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press

The essay that quietly invented the attention economy. Simon's argument compresses into one sentence: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Written in 1971, read it now in the middle of an LLM-enabled…

Foucault's Pendulum

Umberto Eco, 1988 · Bompiani (trans. William Weaver, 1989)

Three bored editors feed fragments of occult lore into a computer they call Abulafia and let it generate connections. It obliges — plausible, coherent, endless links between templars and kabbalah and secret history — and…

Miozzi addresses a gap in price theory that matters for product strategy: if markets are always in motion, what do current prices actually tell us? The Austrian school insight is that disequilibrium prices carry differen…